My lab has been working on new software for automatic post-hoc pupillometry measurement that takes as input a video of a study participant and produces measures of relative changes in pupil size over the course of the video. We've already made an MTurk tool for manual annotation of pupil size, which is used for a secondary analysis in this preprint
https://psyarxiv.com/xcj52 (in infants, pupils are less dilated during soothing lullabies than exciting other songs). An automatic version, where MTurk workers are replaced with a neural net, is giving promising results.
We are applying for some NSF funding to build a fully automatic version, with an eye toward making the method feasible with webcam videos of the sort that "participate-from-home" studies will produce. It should work in adult, child, and infant participants. As part of the proposal, we plan to release a private beta version of the software to a group of labs who will try out the method on their own participant videos.
I'm writing to ask if you would be interested in being a beta tester, and if so, to ask that you submit a Letter of Collaboration that we can include in our NSF application.
The only expectation of beta testers is to do a pupillometry analysis of your participant videos (in any type of experiment) using the beta software and to let us know how it went: we would just ask for some feedback on the software so that we can improve it, and possibly some summary statistics describing the results (e.g., main effect size; comparison to other measures you happened to use, like psychophysiology, or convergent validity with pupillometry measured with an eye tracker).
If you are interested in being a beta tester, please send an NSF-style Letter of Collaboration to musiclab+pupils@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. It needs to be a pdf, on your letterhead, and signed, with the following text as the body of the letter:
If the proposal submitted by Dr. Samuel Mehr entitled "Post-hoc pupillometry" is selected for funding by NSF, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the Project Description or the Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources section of the proposal.
Happy to chat with anyone about this off-list and thanks in advance to those who are interested in beta testing!
best,
Sam
Samuel Mehr
Department of Psychology
Harvard University